A Web management protocol is a protocol for the management of servers, devices, applications, and a variety of Web services. One type of Web management protocol is called Web Services-Management (or WS-Management). The WS-Management protocol is a standard that was published in 2005 by a group of companies to ensure access and management of devices that comply with this standard regardless of their software and hardware infrastructure. There are an increasing number of devices, servers, software products and even other standards that support the WS-Management protocol.
In order to be viable a WS-Management software product needs to support and manage a wide variety of devices and systems. For example, some WS-Management software products support more than 100,000 different WS-Management devices. One difficulty, however, is that whenever a new WS-Management software product is released it is desirable that it be verified on each of these devices. This can be an enormous and expensive task requiring the use of tens of thousands or even more physical devices to build a verification environment in which to verify that the software product is compatible with each device.